Two Unpublished Fragments by Horkheimer and Adorno

On the Tasks of Post-War Marxism | Translated and Edited by James Crane
The Birth of Comedy by Max Ernst (1947)

Foreword

Sourced from the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv (MHA), both fragments—“On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party” and “The Curse of Writing Today”—are located under the subheading “Miscellaneous Manuscripts (1946),”1 filed alongside three (of the four surviving) typescripts from Horkheimer’s “Conversations with Theodor W. Adorno,” recorded during the first two weeks of October 1946, about the planned sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment. These Diskussionsprotokolle were first published posthumously in Volume 12 of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften under the title: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik.”2 In addition to these discussions, the last two fragments under the same subheading were also selected for publication in the same volume of Horkheimer’s GS: “Towards a Critique of the American Social Sciences” and “The Fate of Revolutionary Movements,” each of which is also dated “October 1946.”3 One possible motive for the omission of the fragments below from Horkheimer’s GS is difficulty in determining authorship. Despite a number of indications to the contrary in the text of the fragments themselves, the archivists (tentatively) attribute them to Adorno alone—a problematic approach the archivists seem to have adopted for several other unpublished fragments from the archive with indeterminate authorship as well.4 In terms of content, there are two grounds for rejecting this attribution.

First, each of the fragments translated below—“On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party” and “The Curse of Writing Today”—is written in the first-person plural voice (“we,” “our,” “us,” etc.), and it is this voice that claims joint authorship of ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ in “The Curse of Writing Today”: “The process of demythologization, as we have described it in the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment,’ should be developed [further] on the basis of the concept of labor.” (In the fall of 1946, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” was only the title of the first chapter of the book, but not the book itself, which was still titled Philosophische Fragmente. The first chapter would only be retitled “Concept of Enlightenment,” and the book as a whole Dialectic of Enlightenment, later in the process of revising the manuscript for publication in late 1947.)5 Further, the same fragment refers in jest to a hypothetical endorsement of incest written by “H” and “A”: “Today, if we were to criticize psychoanalysis and exhort to incest, Herr Schapiro would say to Herr Kohn: Have you read H and A’s rather interesting criticism yet?” The other fragment, “On the Relation of Critical Intellectuals to the Proletariat and the Communist Party,” is likewise written in the first-person plural throughout.

Second, the fragments seem to refer to debates Horkheimer and Adorno were having with their collaborators about the correct relationship between critical intellectuals and the communist party—in particular, Horkheimer’s dispute with Paul Massing and Leo Löwenthal. As evident from Horkheimer’s correspondence with Löwenthal between July through October 1946, Löwenthal and Massing tried (in vain) to convince Horkheimer and Adorno to include stronger criticisms of the USSR and tone down criticisms of the ‘liberal democracies’ as the group finalized the draft for Thesis VII of “Elements of Anti-Semitism.”6 Given that Löwenthal expresses his consternation in said correspondence that “Mr. Eisler”—referring to Hans Eisler, partisan of the official communist movement and collaborator of Adorno’s—“did not explode” upon reading the drafts of Thesis VII., it is reasonable to assume that the remark in “On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party” which explicitly names Eisler and Massing as representatives of the dichotomous positions towards the existing communist party criticized in the fragment (“… we would emulate neither Eisler nor Massing”) is a direct reference to Horkheimer and Adorno’s ongoing dispute with Löwenthal and Massing in the fall of 1946.

In sum, both grounds for objecting to the attribution of these fragments to Adorno alone double as reasons for interpreting them as intrinsically bound up with the development of ‘Critical Theory’ through 1946, and arguably through the late 1940s as a whole.7 The unapologetic profession of a revolutionary communism in defiance of Stalin’s USSR and refusal of the reformist postwar settlement in the liberal-democratic states, the quasi-third-worldist redeployment of the concept of ‘proletarian nations’ against Hitlerian white supremacy, and the projected development the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ through the medium of ‘racket theory’ into a negative outline of a new internationalism—none of this can be divorced from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment without betraying the spirit of the radical, heterodox Marxism that still animates it, however subterraneanly.

On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party

Intellectuals, especially the more sociologically informed, are fundamentally convinced that ‘revolution’ has outlived itself. Even mention of its possibility sounds naive. Any hope for armed uprising falls silent not only when forced to confront the backwardness of the barricades before advances in modern weapons technology, but also in view of the more humane development of social reforms in England and even America. Whenever ‘revolution’ is spoken of, neither friend nor foe bother to distinguish between communism and the Russian fatherland any longer. ‘Marxism’ is Stalin’s policy; the revolt of the working class, the invasion of the Red Army. By such thinking, the fear that there could be anything other than that which exists, that there might be something more at which historical action should be aimed, is appeased; for the strife between nations and power-blocs takes place entirely within the framework of established society instead. No matter the outcome, the already powerful grow more powerful still; weaker competitors lose, just as they always have. What politics ought to abolish becomes politics par excellence. Thus, the mechanism meant to absorb the total energies of society has today become superfluous. When the life-process of society was still opaque to most of its members, politics, as a split-off, specialized sphere of social behavior, still had a semblance of substantiality; its irrationality, an index of the alleged ratio of those at the wheel. Today, the technical and human forces of production have been developed to such a great extent that really everyone already knows how it functions, what it’s all about, what’s possible, what the goal really is, only it is precisely this knowledge which is not conscious.

‘Spirit’ as designation for a sector of the division of labor is indeed a reified function; on the other hand, one cannot simply leap over the division of labor, especially not like the Russians do. They believe that by plugging it directly into the business of politics and administration, participation in factory assemblies, etc., its isolation can be abolished. But this is untrue, because it snuffs out the last spark of autonomy that still glimmered in that sector by handing it over to the worst of all specialistdom—namely, the administrator. For Marx, spirit, as a moment of the revolutionary movement which was supposed to break through reified society, possessed the substantiality of the non-reified human being.

Our difficulty is double: we do not want to become mere “third persons” again.8 This doesn’t mean we have anything against the “parasitic.” On the contrary—freedom from the compulsion of production in decadent bourgeois society went hand-in-hand with the survival of autonomy. However, after Marx, one can no longer seek to entertain the bourgeoisie in the role of the “third person,” be it through critique or glorification. We must maintain our clarity on this point, though we know full well that our spiritual-intellectual occupation is really still just the natural mode of existence for the sons of rich parents. Were we “existential philosophers,” this is how we would reflect on our “existence.”

The other difficulty relates to the concept of practice, as opposite fetishized spirit. This stems from the state of the worker’s movement. We do not believe anyone should be forced to join the ranks of those who accept the alternative of being “for” or “against” the communist party; we would emulate neither Eisler nor Massing. To accept this alternative without reservation would itself entail the recognition that the revolution has ended in failure. To the contrary, we believe that this very dichotomy, and above all the communist party itself, belongs to that world which is to be overcome through the revolution. If it is true that technology is revolutionizing the entire world, readying it for the creation of a human society, then the Russians, and above all their leaders, are objectively complicit in arresting this development. Despite their forward-driving role in Asia, they reinforce the forgetting of the society that would, today, correspond to the level of development of the forces of production on a global scale. Therefore however reluctant we are to, we must aim a critique at the international organizations as the poor, overextended rackets they are—as the caricature of what could be. Even now they evince only the shared interests of the bureaucracies of various national rackets. The opposition between Russia and America has in both countries largely had the function of an excuse to the masses for reducing the returns of their labor by invoking the menace of the opposing power-bloc.

As far as the right state of humanity—already possible today—is concerned, Marx essentially defined it through the concept of leisure. We must build on this concept, which, incidentally, is deeply connected with that of the “third person.” However, we must also be careful not to follow Marx in endorsing the historical process as a whole simply because it leads to harmony through revolution, for instance. Humanity cannot realize paradise with bloody hands.

The structure of the concept of dehumanization has changed. For Marx, it signified non-participation in culture, brutalization; today, it proceeds through the complete conquest of culture, an ironic fulfillment of Hegel’s idea of the identity between what man is for-himself and his social substance. This development affects the concept of leisure. Labor-time has, in fact, already been reduced under monopoly capitalism through the complete dematerialization of labor. But this disqualification of labor has fallen victim to what, in Marx’s conception, was supposed to make humans human in their leisure. The individual that, according to Hegel, can only realize itself in universal social determinations has so completely realized itself through them that there’s nothing that could really be considered individual about them anymore (Bloom, Flowerman). This involves, however, the dialectic whereby the individual, having realized its substance in the Hegelian sense, loses any substance it had at the same time: to the individual, the choice of their vocation, such as being chief of police, is as “external” to them in the Hegelian sense as the question of whether they prefer roast veal or roast mutton. The less they need to work, the more they become a mere appendage of the machine in their leisure.

In a certain sense, politics is no longer relevant, since what it’s all about, what the goal of politics really is has become clear to just about everyone. What the American workers ought to do is so clear that no movement is required for this purpose anymore. The communist party is so powerless precisely because it’s no longer connected to any truly attainable revolutionary goal whatsoever[; just] blind adherence to an array of irrational elements, e.g., leadership, wage-differentiation, the cult of production-as-such, the hypostasizing of ‘the nation’ and ‘the people,’ the fetishizing of concepts like organization and discipline[, the] type of the organizer. But despite everything, all the decent people still caught in the party—the stalwarts, if they’re not intellectuals or evil—are mostly good. [The party still has a] progressive, world-political function, especially in Asia and the European territories they’ve seized. The pressure that stems from the fact that today human beings work for cliques afraid of being overthrown the whole world over—this pressure must be abolished. Just as corporate trusts don’t want their salaried employees to act on their own initiative spontaneously and beyond their assigned stations, the communist worker ought to stick to their assigned functions in party-work and, for God’s sake, not worry about the big picture. In our Manifesto we must do justice to the people in the party, but as revolutionaries;9 not in the manner of bourgeois critique, which always defends the misled masses from the ones pulling the strings [Drahtzieher]; quite the contrary, the leadership holds the strings still. One can only be totally opposed to what’s happened if one says it always had to happen this way.

To view the communist revolution as the promenade of the red army through the Western countries still has at least the aura of high treason for the proletarian masses of Europe and Asia; for the oppressed Russian people, such a conception is nothing but Kadavergehorsam.10 The communist parties outside [Russia] are fifth columns and, of course, immediately remind every revolutionary impulse within Russia that it must be unpatriotic. In turn, this rebounds on western communism, which, through the concept of such narrow-minded patriotism, shares an understanding with the reactionaries of each respective country and simply writes a different name into the same schema of categories. This schematism is part of the transformation of communism into a system of delusion [Wahnsystem]. The phenomenon is not primarily psychological, but objective in origin, arising from the separation of communism from theory and its pragmatic identification with Russia. Power becomes panacea, and connection to it cuts off consciousness and leads to blindness instead of a dialectical process in thinking and practice. The paranoid features of its followers correspond to the fascistization of the party.

The content of this section should be determining the political action which, in our view, would today be the first step towards the realization of the right order and which only remains undone due to the stupefaction of human beings. This action would have to consist in the American workers calling on their counterparts in Russia, the only power in the world of equal rank, to send their own leaders, the whole repressive baggage of administration, straight to hell. Then, the Americans should say, they’ll ensure that all production for the sake of waging war is brought to a halt. Motive for this action: provision for the earth [as a whole] is hindered by the fact that in the decisive countries, countless working hours are spent in part on means of destruction, in part on means of stupefaction. The latter includes the swindle of technical differentiation (De Soto vs. Plymouth, and the social competition this promotes), and, of course, pseudo-production [Scheinproduktion] such as advertising. More and more working hours are therefore squandered while innumerable labor-saving inventions are left unused because of capitalist and trade-unionist interests, not to mention the forces which lie fallow in unemployment. Only once this nonsense, which the rulers on both sides employ to instill the reason of that which exists into the masses by fear, has been dispelled can the masses of these countries who’ve been duped by it up to now really begin to help the rest of the world. It will then become evident that no necessary opposition exists between this “rest” who are kept immiserated despite the potential ‘wealth of nations’ and the workers who profit from this very misery without clear consciousness of doing so. Humanity is ripe for socialism.

To prove this, the American workers must of course get serious. A gesture such as the one described above assumes they are willing, after fundamentally changing the relations in their own country, to wage war on Russia should it resist. That American workers believe the most advanced country on earth could carry out a revolution without at the same time assuming responsibility for the earth as a whole is almost as narrow-minded as the idea of “socialism in one country,” or [the idea] that the revolution consists solely in preventing American monopolists—who are in fact drooling at the thought of making common cause with Stalin—from waging war against Russia.

The objection that American workers are only getting better and better off, that they have no materialistic reason for revolution, does not stand up to scrutiny. The most revolutionary strata of the European working class were often the higher-paid, and therefore more advanced and in a position to lead the rest of the class. It is a product of the apparatus of stupefaction [Verdummungsapparats] that so many believe the pressure, oppression, and danger brought down on the proletariat is any lesser today than it was in the nineteenth century. It is true that corruption has greater social impact through the creation of distinctions internal to the proletariat, such as that between the skilled mechanical workers in the North and the unskilled Negroes in the South. The distinctions are cruder and the corrupted, a majority; but the value of the acquisition, the hygienic life of the modern worker, is extremely dubious. Their difference from the authorities in their own camp, the union bosses and monopolists, is immeasurably great; the suffering of the most downtrodden strata of the oppressed in their own country, and even more so that of the world as a whole, infinitely great; and the threat of total war, gigantic. In view of the transposition of the class struggle onto the international stage (to be dealt with in another part of the text),11 the “better and better” situated the American working class happens to be, the better the vanguard for the oppressed of all countries.

Hitler’s concept of the “proletarian nation” ought to be taken up, but its point must be turned back upon itself. It correctly describes the tendency of class struggle to transpose itself into conflicts on the international level. For Hitler, however, this concept only plays the role of an ideology because, on the one hand, it helped cover-up class antagonisms in his own country, and on the other, Hitler pretended as if by speaking for the German proletarian nation he had taken the side of the weaker, when in actuality it was precisely that of the stronger—and for the sake of exhorting Germany to become the strong arm for the supremacy of the white race. Anti-Semitism, along with the entirety of race-theory, is probably to be understood in the sense of such a conception. Lust for the eradication of the Jews exhibits the unconscious fear of losing their dominion to the colored peoples of the world. In opposition to Hitler then, one must take the concept of the proletarian nation seriously; for him, this concept has exactly the same function the word “socialism” does in the name of his party on the domestic front.12

That the proletarians of the industrialized countries feel themselves the vanguard of the colored peoples of the world does not mean they are under any illusions about the possible imperialism of the latter, as exemplified in the case of the Japanese. Emancipation in colonial areas, from Argentina to Pakistan, is being carried out in semi-fascistic forms and is thoroughly anti-Semitic. However, imperialism need not become reality if the proletarians really make their revolution. The step we have described could truly transform the world. It would eliminate the very grounds of such imperialism. With the Western and Russian workers united, not even the Malays would need to replay the game of the ascendant bourgeoisie. Just as little would the backwards strata of the workers in more advanced countries be forced to act out their backwards ideologies after the revolution. Once the vanguard, national or international, has taken such a step (precisely what Lenin originally meant by the ‘dictatorship’), then humanity will be grasped at its very core: that is the meaning of Marx’s theory.

The Curse of Writing Today

The curse of writing today consists in the fact that no matter how it turns out, it never gets a rise out of anyone anymore. The Communist Manifesto really set something else into motion. It presupposes a non-integrated society: the proletariat is not yet completely “inside,” and insofar as it has no part in “humanity” proper, it is all the better for it, even in its so-called dehumanization. Today, if we were to criticize psychoanalysis and exhort the reader to incest, Herr Schapiro would say to Herr Kohn: have you read H and A’s rather interesting criticism yet? We believe that the relationship between what is written and the world must, as it is co-decisive for the truth of the thing, be consciously incorporated into its theoretical formulation. However, it’s precisely this relationship that’s become questionable for us.

The sole path we see before us on which we won’t fall behind Marx is one that takes his categories as a point of departure. Here, we’re thinking of concepts like class and labor. As for class, we have a critique in mind, the object of which is the dissolution of class into rackets. Perhaps there has never been a ‘class’ in the strict sense. The process of demythologization, as we have described it in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” should be further developed vis-a-vis the concept of labor. Enlightenment means the detachment of labor from its material. Today, this process is essentially mediated through trade unions. They separate the laborer more and more from his objective interests. The task is to uncover the dialectic of this process, and thus of the labor movement and the concept of the proletariat.

We cannot be certain whether the adoption of Marxian categories guarantees any timeliness to our theoretical activity today. For starters, however, it seems to us as if an attack on the repressive role of the rackets (religious, political, military, industrial, trade unionist), which fight with one another on the surface but in truth agree with one another, could drive the movement further. In this regard, it is above all important to keep in mind that while the attack must be aimed at national rackets, the transposition of class relations onto the international stage must be taken into consideration where content is concerned. In the era of the transfer of [intra-]national class relations onto the oppression of entire peoples [Völker] by other peoples, the leaders of peoples join forces with all the gangsters of the world under the star of celebrity into a kind of international union. One such exponent of this union is Harold Laski.

The encroaching integration of society makes the concept of non-conformism itself problematic in the sense that no theoretical nor even practical expression can be imagined that is not already ensnared in one form or another in the meshes of the system. One must accordingly develop forms of resistance different from those which presuppose some kind of transcendence to society, as with those of Marx’s time when the poor still had to be pressed into factories. Rather, the task today is to raise to consciousness those tendencies maturing even now within the integral society itself towards its overturning, and indeed to help them to the point they overturn it. The process of the radical alienation of labor, the domination of nature taken to its extreme, signifies the radical self-alienation of the human being, and thereby the absolutely negative—at the same time so “nearly utopia.” The fully reified society is infinitely close to the concept of humanity. The ant colony is a projection of those who prepare it, but repress it from their consciousness. Its conscious induction could coincide with its abolition.

Notes

  1. “Zum Verhältnis der kritischen Intellektuellen zu Proletariat und kommunistischer Partei” and “Der Fluch des Schreibens.” MHA Na 1 806, 107-118. ↩

  2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik] (1946)” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12. Eds. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 593-605. ↩

  3. See the author’s translation of Max Horkheimer, “Towards a Critique of the American Social Sciences;” “The Fate of Revolutionary Movements;” and another text under the subheading “Miscellaneous Manuscripts (1946),” “Notes: On Culture and Revolution;” in James Crane (ed.), “MAX HORKHEIMER: PHILOSOPHICAL PARERGA (1945-1949),” Substudies (blog), 5/29/2025. [link] ↩

  4. This is the case, for instance, with Adorno and Horkheimer’s co-authored “Schemata” of 1942 for the book that would become Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the introductory note to my translation of the “Schemata,” I argue this attribution is untenable given both the content of the “Schemata” and other attributions made by the archivists themselves. James Crane (ed.), “Revised Collection—Schemata for the ‘Dialectic’ (1939-1944),” Substudies (blog), 4/18/2025 [link] ↩

  5. James Crane (ed.), “Notes: Towards a Reconstruction of the ‘Dialectic,’ Part 2.” Substudies (blog), 6/03/2025. [link] ↩

  6. Author’s translation, Max Horkheimer and Leo Löwenthal, “II. Debating Thesis VII of the “Elements”: Democracy and Fascism; Liberalism or Communism (Summer-Fall 1946),” in James Crane (ed.), “Collection: ‘First Must the Site Be Cleared’ (1945-1949),” Substudies (blog), 6/03/2025. [link] ↩

  7. The similarities between these fragments and Marcuse’s libertarian-communist “Theses” on postwar Critical Theory from February 1947, which were enthusiastically received by Horkheimer (and seemingly by Adorno as well), cannot be overlooked. Author’s translation, Herbert Marcuse, “I. Theses on Postwar Critical Theory: Part I (February 1947),” in James Crane (ed.), “Herbert Marcuse: Theses on Postwar Critical Theory (1947),” Substudies (blog), 8/5/2025. [link] ↩

  8. (Editor’s note:) On the problem of the intellectual as “third person,” see Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951), Part II [1945], (§86) “Little Hans.”: “Only those who remain pure to a certain extent, have enough hate, nerves, freedom and mobility to withstand the world, but precisely by virtue of the illusion of purity—for they live in the “third person”—they allow it to triumph not merely the world outside, but in the innermost cells of their thought.” ↩

  9. (Editor’s note:) Adorno and Horkheimer’s plan to write a new Communist Manifesto date back to their discussions in 1939. Cf. James Crane (ed.), “Translation: Adorno & Horkheimer’s 1939 Discussion on “The Temporal Core of Truth. Experience & Utopia in Dialectical Theory.” Substudies (blog), 1/13/2025. [link] ↩

  10. (Editor’s note:) A word borrowed from St. Ignatius of Loyola’s ‘Constitutions’—which commended the reader to resistanceless obedience of the divine, as if one were a cadaver—by early 19th century German critics of Jesuit obedience, later applied more typically to the blind loyalty of Prussian militarism and, eventually, to the Nazis themselves. ↩

  11. (Editor’s note:) Cf. Horkheimer to Marcuse, 2/28/1948. MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 931-934. Author’s translation, “Horkheimer—Letter: The Internationalization of Class Conflict (2/28/1948).” Substudies (blog), [link] ↩

  12. (Editor’s note:) Cf. Adorno to his Parents, 9/26/1943: “… for there is about as much similarity between organized theft by the oppressors and socialism as there is between heaven and hell.” Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents 1939-1951. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), 149. ↩